In the last few years, there has been great development in semiconductor technology that allowed radio frequency (RF) and digital baseband integration in a complete system-on-chip (SoC). This was accompanied with the development of wireless communications standards such as WLAN, WiMAX. In addition, cellular communications standards have been modified to provide services beyond voice communications such as high data rate and video communications. For example, EDGE and GPRS are two enhancements that provide high data rate capability for the GSM standard that was originally designed for voice communications. The huge end user demand for integrating different services on a single handset, in addition to the requirement of global roaming, led the manufacturers to strive to develop software-defined radio (SDR).
Despite the great development in semiconductor technology, circuit design techniques are still not capable of providing a full spectrum of SDR operation. That's why different terminology appeared, like multiband, multistandard or multimode, and all are considered under the umbrella of SDR, although they are really not. A transceiver can be referred to as SDR if its communication functions are realized as programs running on a suitable processor. Based on the same hardware, different transmitter/receiver algorithms, which usually describe transmission standards, are implemented in software.
Project 25 (P25) is an open architecture, user driven suite of system standards that define digital radio communications system architectures capable of serving the needs of Public Safety and Government organizations. The P25 suite of standards involves digital Land Mobile Radio (LMR) services for local, state/provincial and national (federal) public safety organizations and agencies. A P25 radio is any radio that conforms to the P25 standard in the way it functions or operates. That is why there is great interest in integrating P25 capability in cellular handsets. P25 compliant technology is being deployed in several phases. Despite this great interest, a cost effective, small profile, integrated P25/celluar handset has not been developed.
As a result, there is a need for a system, method and apparatus for providing communications that conform to a cellular communication standard (e.g., CDMA, WCDMA, EDGE, GPRS, GSM, LTE, TDMA, OFDM, etc.) and a non-cellular communication standard (e.g., Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11, P25, UMTS, non-P25 emergency standard, etc.).